Midnight Hike

Imagine:

First, you hear the water.  The stream rests in the foreground of your setting, so it strikes you first.  It catches the ears more so than the eyes; first, because there are enough pines to block it from view so you only hear its laughing, delectable presence pattering against your eardrums and, second, because dusk is fading rather quickly and dark is seizing supremacy.  Of course, the bubbling of the brook is only the first sensation to roll over your senses.  The scent of nature, predominantly that of pine needles, clings gently to the air as you breath it in.  Your eyes have already discovered a feast of sights too vast to consume all at once: the mighty mines, the fading rays of sunlight dancing over the water, and the mountain peaks towering over everything before and behind you.  A New Mexico canyon camping ground has far exceeded your expectations.  Your excitement has already reached a peak, since you already watched the greyish blue shapes on the horizon forming into real towers of rock, earth, and trees for hours as you drove closer to them across the flat, desert-like terrain of Oklahoma.  The blood in your veins pulses a little faster than usual, quickened by a number of joyous anticipations.

Then you hear the ominous words “midnight hike.”

That particular phrase only raises the already high spirits of your traveling companions, but it dampens yours slightly.  You have never hiked in the dark before, and certainly never on a mountain trail in the dark.  You don’t even know where that scraggly little dirt path goes, or if it goes anywhere at all.  Being someone who admits to a slight fear of the dark and having a great deal more terror for the darkness than you care to confess, you aren’t too keen on the whole idea.  These traveling companion—your sister and father—share a wild, adventurous steak which often causes you to not entirely trust them, though you always believe in them.  However, they will go with or without you, and  it would probably be better to go and die with them than be left in a tent waiting for those who might never return.

So, you go.

The result pleasantly surprises you.  Granted, you get an anxious certainty that you’re about to run into danger now and then—the sort of feeling that stirs a queasiness in the deepest pit of your gut and makes every hair on your body bristle.  However, you keep enough bravery from your fearless company to reason that not every twig in the dark can be a rattlesnake and none of the rustling bushes you note are large enough to conceal a bear.  Once you rationalize that, you actually start to enjoy yourself.  The path winds along the stream, so you keep the soothing benefit of its sound and never have to climb higher than the canyon floor.  Of course, you can’t really see your way at all, but there’s a sort of thrill in learning the knack of staying on the path by the contrast in sound and feel of dry grass under your feet instead of the little dirt road.  And what you can see of the nature around you possesses a strange, resounding sort of enchantment in the dark—something that almost feels endless.

And then you reach it.

The pines suddenly form a doorway that opens into a little glade, where the stream gets broader beside you and runs quieter: slow and still.    Everything almost seems to let out a long breath: silent and serene.  You look up and there hangs the waning moon, slipping through a gap in the clouds that seems custom cut to allow the silvery light to bathe the landscape.  Everything from the mountain tops to the stream at their base is suddenly luminescent—brilliant in twilight beauty  that practically sings out a melody of praise to its creator.  And then, in the very moment you think only the clouds stand in the way of a perfect scene, the overcast curtain suddenly rolls back.  Starlight twinkles down on the night you once found frightening, and you know all fear has been conquered.  In its place is a bottomless thirst  for Beauty which the endless glory about you will never fail to satiate.  Then, for that Eternal Moment,

You feel Infinite.